On a May afternoon in 1963, on the Tonto Platform below the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, the temperature hit one hundred twenty-six degrees, and Colin Fletcher took off the last of his remaining clothes. Clad now in just his socks, boots, and hat, he shouldered his sixty-pound pack and continued hiking. There hadn’t been much to remove, really, as he was already down to his boxers. But Fletcher was on a long, perhaps lifelong, quest to strip away anything that stood between him and “getting beneath the surface of things”—clothing, gear, people. He called such distractions “trivia.”
“As I walked on eastward…through my private, segregated, Tonto world (exercising due care at first for previously protected sectors of my anatomy) I found I had gained more than coolness,” he wrote. “I felt a quite unexpected sense of freedom from restraint.”
Feeling hemmed in wouldn’t seem to have been a problem for Fletcher, especially by 1963, when he was forty-one and about to
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